Cray T3E, Dedicated to Exploring Enigmas of Nature, Comes to Lab

By Jeffery Kahn, jbkahn@lbl.gov

September 19, 1996

BERKELEY, CA --
Continuing its mission to extend the limits of scientific understanding, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has acquired a Cray T3E, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Cray T3E becomes the centerpiece of the Lab's National Energy Research
Scientific Computing (NERSC) center, a facility that provides high performance
computing to thousands of Department of Energy researchers all over the world.
The range of energy research problems they work on include fusion, the modeling
and design of biological molecules, the development of new materials, and
global climate change.

At the leading edge of the revolution taking place in supercomputing hardware,
the T3E is a "highly parallel" system capable of teaming thousands of
microprocessors. These microprocessors, made by the Digital Equipment Corp.,
are the world's fastest. Each DECchip 21164 processor can perform 600 million
calculations or MFLOPS per second. Berkeley Lab's T3E will begin service with
128 processors with plans to scale-up to 512 processors early next year. At
that time, the machine will be capable of more than 300 billion calculations
per second. A person using a hand-held calculator would take some 40,000 years
to do what this Cray does in one second.

Bill Kramer, head of NERSC's High Performance Computing Department, said this
is the first of the new Cray T3Es "that has passed a performance test suite
consisting of a wide range of scientific applications. And, it is the first T3E
planned for real production use right from the beginning."

The Cray T3E can be considered a form of time machine. Like eyes that can
look into the future, the machine makes it possible to pose questions and
resolve problems years and years before it would be feasible by any other
approach. How can the internal combustion engine be made both more efficient
and less polluting? What changes will occur to the Earth's climate? What shape
molecule should be engineered to perform a targeted biological function? Large
scale computation centers attack questions like these, at the frontiers of
science. And, as they do so, they pioneer the future of computing itself --
hardware, software, and networks destined to be increasingly important to our
daily lives.

Bill McCurdy, Berkeley Lab's associate laboratory director for Computing
Sciences, is among those who believe that supercomputers have changed the very
nature of science. The traditional interplay between theory and experiment now
has been joined by a new mode of inquiry, that of computational experiment.

"Over the past quarter-century," observes McCurdy, "a fundamental change has
occurred in the way scientists and engineers view computation as a tool of
research. In the 1960s, computation was a specialized tool whose application
was largely limited to a few disciplines of physics, engineering, and
chemistry, and which was widely considered to be merely an adjunct of theory.
After a quarter-century of spectacular advances in computing hardware and
numerical algorithms, we now commonly speak of experiment, theory, and
computation as the three principal elements of modern scientific research. The
change in our thinking is dramatically highlighted by discussions of
large-scale computational experiments appearing in the scientific literature,
side-by-side with the results of physical experiments."

In many cases, computer simulation or modeling is the only approach available
to researchers. Physical experiments may not be possible because they are
prohibitively large or small, unfold too quickly or too slowly, or because they
cost too much. Researchers, however, can create computational models of
physical phenomena and validate them with experiments. Through these models,
supercomputers are able to simulate and explore what otherwise can be
off-limits.

Researchers all over the nation have lined up to use the T3E. Kramer notes
that half of its time has been dedicated to "Grand Challenges," scientific
problems that the federal government designates as national priorities. More
than 100 research groups have submitted proposals for use of the remaining time
available on the T3E. Despite the enormous computing resources of the machine,
the Cray can accommodate only one-tenth of these requests.

Scientists interact with NERSC's supercomputers through the Department of
Energy's major high-speed network, the Energy Sciences Network or ESnet.
ESnet's operations are headquartered at Berkeley Lab.

Like a virtual office hallway, ESnet connects users all over the world to
Berkeley's supercomputers as well as to a number of other unique Energy
Department facilities. Because of its need to move huge streams of
information, the ESnet is a prime shaper of the future face of the Internet.
ESnet is the first national production network to make use of the new
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology, which can transmit both voice and
data. Some legs of ESnet's ATM network run at speeds of up to 155 million bits
per second. That's compared to the 28 thousand bit-per-second speed of modems
now coming into use on PCs.

Berkeley Lab conducts unclassified scientific research for the U.S. Department
of Energy. It is located in Berkeley, California and is managed by the
University of California.